Diced Veggies – Simple, Yet Engaging

There is something great about taking a game off the shelf and knowing you aren’t in for a multi-hour experience. Don’t get me wrong, I love longer games, and obviously have plenty to choose from. But every once in a while, you just want a nice short game that can be fun for all ages, and easy enough to understand that you can even teach it to someone new in just a few minutes.

At GenCon 2023, I had the privilege of picking up a copy of Diced Veggies, a fun and engaging order completion game with dice. Dice, folks, dice! You know I love dice! Let’s take a look!

How to Play

In Diced Veggies, players will use a knife to ‘carve’ dice from a central block of dice – each player must make a cut from an edge, and a total of 10 pips or less worth of dice can be cut at one time. The dice are different colors which are each associated with a type of vegetable, such as red for tomatoes, or light brown for mushrooms. Payers will be using these dice to complete order cards in front of them.

In many cases, outside of the 10 pip rule, the number of dice might not matter. However certain orders and certain bonus cards (which can be paired with a finished order) do require specific dice to finish. I think that’s where the simplicity of the experience crosses over into the deep strategy that does exist during certain moments.

Then addition of Hype Cards allows you to get even more points for your recipes, and we love that little addition to the game that matters so much!

Why we Like it So Much

So why do we like this simple game so much? Diced Veggies is a great game for almost all ages. We’ve played it with adult friends, but also brought it to the table with our kids. The younger kids might not grasp the strategic decisions around which dice to nab each turn, but they understand the basics, enough to play an entire game and remain mostly competitive.

This is such a great little game for teaching big concepts such as thinking ahead, resource management, and more. The more they play, the more they grasp! The 9 year old can now beat me from time-to-time!

But it does come down to simplicity. This can be taught and played within 20 minutes or so, depending on the game group size. Even novice board game players will find the rule set easy, and the turn-to-turn decisions simple enough. There are no overly complicated things to think about, which makes this a great social experience as well.

Conclusion

To say it’s simplistic is by no means a slight to the game. This is one of my favorite games I played this year, and it’s one that won’t leave the collection for a long time, and likely ever. With so many review games crossing the threshold of my house, it’s inevitable that even good games end up going the other way and leaving the collection.

In December alone, GamesReviews handled 31 board game reviews (some of which are not posted yet!) and I already know many of these games, despite being good, or destined for the local library or the collections of friends at some point. Not Diced Veggies – this one will stay for good, we think!